1. November

York became the capital of a Scandinavian kingdom, ruled at times from Dublin, and a trading town whose street names still end in -gate, from Old Norse gata, street. The digs at Coppergate found houses, workshops, shoes and the waterlogged timber of a whole street. Its last king, Eric Bloodaxe,…

It rode north from East Anglia and took York on All Saints’ Day, while Northumbria was split between two rival kings. The kings made peace with each other and stormed the city the next March; both died in the attempt.

Giuliano della Rovere, nephew of Sixtus IV, was elected in one of the shortest conclaves on record and spent his reign winning back the Papal States, in armour at the siege of Mirandola in the snow of January 1511. He also hired Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael.

The Revels Office account for 1604–05 lists the season’s plays with their authors. Othello opened it on Hallowmas, in the Banqueting House, by “Shaxberd”. That season the King’s Men also played Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labour’s Lost and…

The Revels account for 1611–12: “Hallomas nyght was presented att Whithall before ye kinges Maiestie a play Called the Tempest”. Four days later the King’s Men played The Winter’s Tale. The Tempest was played again for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding celebrations in the winter of 1612–13.

On All Saints’ morning an earthquake, fire and a tsunami destroyed much of Lisbon and killed tens of thousands. Voltaire’s poem on it mocked the optimism of Pope and Leibniz; Rousseau wrote back that nature had not built twenty thousand houses of six and seven storeys there. The argument ends up…

With no trade left, the Company was a government contractor: its directors ran India under the Board of Control and its shareholders lived on a dividend charged to Indian taxpayers.

A trading company became a state. In 1765 the Mughal emperor made the East India Company collector of the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and it conquered the rest of the subcontinent with sepoy armies paid from Indian taxes.

Crown rule over British India and alliances with some 560 princely states, run by about a thousand British officials of the Indian Civil Service at the top. Railways, canals and famines, universities and a new Indian middle class that turned the rulers’ language against them.

Queen Victoria’s proclamation, read at Allahabad by Lord Canning, ended the Company’s rule, promised religious non-interference and made the governor-general a viceroy. Zafar had already been sent into exile in Rangoon.

With no trade and no territory, the Company was a shell that paid a dividend: its capital stock stayed on the books, and the India Office kept its records. East India House was sold and pulled down in 1861.

Having “passed into the Bistritza”, the launch has overhauled every boat, big and little. At Fundu, where the Bistritza meets the Sereth, they buy a Roumanian flag and fly it, and are shown deference by everyone they stop.

They travel all day at a good speed, with fresh horses at every stop. A woman who sees the scar on Mina’s forehead crosses herself and puts out two fingers against the evil eye, as the Bistritz crowd once did for Jonathan.

Sixteen men set out with ten ponies, two dog teams and the motor party ahead. The ponies marched by night to rest in the warmth of the day. A blizzard pinned everyone below the Beardmore Glacier for four days from 5 December, eating into the food meant for the plateau.

In the Italo-Turkish War, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti leaned out of his Etrich Taube over Libya and dropped four hand grenades on Ottoman troops at the oasis of Ain Zara.

He had found the Entwurf equations wrong, and David Hilbert in Göttingen, who had heard him lecture there that summer, was closing in on the same problem. So Einstein took a paper to the Prussian Academy every Thursday for four weeks, eating little and sleeping less.

A heavy old floe about a mile and a half from the wreck, about a mile square at first. Parties went back to the ship for wood, food and Frank Hurley’s photographic plates; he kept about 120 and smashed the rest so that he could not change his mind.

Two pounds of personal gear a man, and not an ounce more. Before setting out they shot the weakest pups and Mrs Chippy, the carpenter’s cat. Hauling two boats on sledges through soft snow and pressure ridges, they gained under two miles in three days, and gave up.

Fourteen years from the Young Turk Revolution to the end of the sultanate: the loss of Libya and the Balkans, a one-party government, the First World War, the destruction of the Armenians, and a new state built in Ankara.

The United States set off the first thermonuclear device on Elugelab in Enewetak Atoll. It yielded 10.4 megatons, about 700 times the Hiroshima bomb, and left a crater where the island had been.

The United States backed South Vietnam against the communist North and the Viet Cong, from advisers in the 1950s to more than half a million troops in 1968. The band starts on the date the U.S. Department of Defense uses. The catalogue’s own Vietnam War timeline tells it in full. A 1995…

Thirteen riders from the Congress of Racial Equality left Washington on two buses to test Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which had outlawed segregated bus terminals. More than 400 riders followed that summer, and over 300 were jailed in Jackson, many in Parchman penitentiary. The Interstate Commerce…

A 305-metre dish laid into a sinkhole in Puerto Rico’s karst hills, with a receiver platform of some 900 tons hung from cables above it. For 53 years the largest single-dish telescope in the world, it found the first binary pulsar, which won a Nobel Prize, and mapped asteroids by radar.

South Vietnamese generals, told by Washington it would not stand in their way, besieged the Gia Long Palace. Diệm and Nhu escaped to Chợ Lớn, surrendered the next morning and were killed in the back of an armoured carrier. Three weeks later Kennedy was assassinated.

From July 1934 no film could open in a major cinema without the seal of Joseph Breen’s Production Code Administration. Crime could not be seen to pay, and the guilty were punished by the last reel. The Code began: No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see…

Aeroflot flew the Tu-144 weekly between Moscow and Alma-Ata, 55 passenger flights in all. After a development aircraft crashed in May 1978, the service stopped for good.

Ion engines let it do what no craft had done: orbit two worlds beyond the Earth and Moon, the giant asteroid Vesta from 2011 and the dwarf planet Ceres from 2015, where it found bright salt deposits in Occator crater.

Twenty-eight countries and the European Union, the US and China among them, signed the Bletchley Declaration on the risks of the most capable AI models — at the wartime codebreaking centre where Alan Turing had worked.